Holocaust
- Distinctive Characteristics
Features of the Nazi
Holocaust
There were several characteristics to the Nazi Holocaust which taken
together distinguish it from other genocides in history.
Premeditation
In 1904, Alfred Ploetz founded the German Eugenics Society. Sixteen
years later, a work seminal to the development of the German eugenics
movement, The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, was
published. Written by Karl Binding, a widely respected judge, and
renowned psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, the work was key to the formulation
of Nazi ideology, rhetoric and practice:
[It] defended the theory which stated that the elimination of "worthless
people" should be legalized. Thus the concepts of "worthless life" or
"life unworthy of life" used by the Nazis come from that book. Binding
and Hoche speak in that book about "worthless human beings". [Binding
and Hoche] plead for "the elimination of those who cannot be saved, ...
whose death is an urgent need" ... [and] about those who are below the
beast[s] [with] "neither the will to live nor to die". [The book also
refers] to those who are "mentally dead" and who form "a foreign body to
the human society".[2]
The work of Ploetz and the words of Binding and Hoche were the
foreshadowings of Hitler's "final solution" two decades later.
The Holocaust was an intentional and meticulously planned attempt to
entirely eradicate the target groups based on ethnicity. It is estimated
that die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish
Question), as the Nazis called it during the Wannsee conference of
January 1942, saw the murder of 60 percent of all the Jews in Europe,
and 35 percent of the world's Jewish population. In a speech in October
1943, Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), told
a group of senior SS men and Nazi party leaders: "What about the women
and children? I decided to find an absolutely clear solution here too. I
regard myself as having no right to exterminate (ausrotten) the men—in
other words, to kill them or have them killed—and to let the avengers in
the form of the children grow up for our sons and grandsons to deal
with. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people
disappear from the earth."
The Holocaust was justified by claiming that the victims were
Untermenschen, i.e., 'underlings' or 'subhumans', who were seen as both
biologically inferior and (in the case of Jews) a potential challenge to
the superiority of the 'Aryans'. Its perpetrators saw it as a form of
eugenics—the creation of a better race by eliminating the designated
"unfit"—along the same lines as their programs of compulsory
sterilization, compulsory euthanasia, and "racial hygiene".
Efficiency
The Holocaust was characterized by the efficient and systematic attempt
on an industrial scale to assemble and murder as many victims as
possible, using all of the resources and technology available to the
Nazi German state.
For example, detailed lists of potential victims were made and
maintained using Dehomag statistical machinery, and meticulous records
of the killings were produced. As prisoners entered the death camps,
they were made to surrender all personal property to the Nazis, which
was then precisely catalogued and tagged, and for which receipts were
issued. In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of
the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more
people; for example, by switching from carbon monoxide poisoning in the
Aktion Reinhard death camps of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to the use
of Zyklon B at Majdanek and Auschwitz.
In his book Russia's War, British historian Richard Overy describes how
the Germans sought more efficient ways to kill people. In 1941, after
occupying Belarus, they used mental patients from Minsk asylums as
guinea pigs. Initially, they tried shooting them by having them stand
one behind the other, so that several people could be killed with one
bullet, but it was too slow. Then they tried dynamite, but few were
killed and many were left wounded with hands and legs missing, so that
the Germans had to finish them off with machine guns. In October 1941,
in Mogilev, they tried the Gaswagen or "gas car". First they used a
light military car, and it took more than 30 minutes for people to die.
Then they used a larger truck exhaust and it took only eight minutes to
kill all the people inside.
Alleged corporate involvement in the Holocaust has created significant
controversy in recent years. Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz camp commandant,
said that far from having to advertise their slave labour services, the
concentration camps were actually approached by various large German
businesses, some of which are still in existence.
Scale
The Holocaust was geographically widespread and methodically conducted
in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory, where Jews and other
victims were targeted in what are now 35 separate European nations, and
sent to labor camps in some nations or extermination camps in others.
Documented evidence suggests that the Nazis planned to carry out their
'final solution' in Britain, North America, and Palestine if these
regions were conquered. The murders continued in different parts of
Nazi-controlled territory until the end of World War II, only completely
ending when the Allies entered Germany itself and forced the Nazis to
surrender in May 1945.
Cruelty
The Nazis carried out cruel and deadly medical experiments on prisoners,
including children. Dr. Josef Mengele, medical officer at Auschwitz and
chief medical officer at Birkenau, was known as the "Angel of Death" for
his sadistic and bizarre medical and eugenics experiments, e.g., trying
to change people's eye colour by injecting dye into their eyes. Many of
these experiments were intended to produce 'racially pure' babies and as
research into weapons and techniques of war. Many of these prisoners did
not survive. Day to day life in the concentration camps was also brutal,
with the Nazis regularly carrying out beatings and acts of torture.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust
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